Implications of Intermodal Matching of Affective Information in Infancy

This pilot study examined infants’ sensitivity to cross-modal affective congruence in audiovisual speech, building on the intersensory redundancy hypothesis. Eight healthy, full-term infants aged 6 to 8 months (2 boys, 6 girls) participated in a paired-preference paradigm in which they viewed two dynamic facial expressions (happy, angry, neutral) while hearing vocal prosody that was emotionally congruent with only one of the faces. Looking time was used as the primary measure of preference. Results indicated that infants tended to look longer at emotionally congruent audiovisual pairings, particularly in the Happy condition, where several participants demonstrated consistent preference for matching faces. Sensitivity to congruence in the Angry condition was more variable across individuals, while Neutral trials elicited little differentiation, suggesting lower salience. Although group-level analyses did not yield significant effects, individual gaze patterns revealed emerging sensitivity to affective congruence by 6 months of age, with potential differences in processing depending on emotional valence. These findings provide preliminary support for the role of intersensory redundancy in guiding attention to emotionally relevant information, highlighting the importance of considering developmental variability in early affective integration.